tlug: CentreCom LA-PCI-T card with netboot

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

We have a collection of terminals running MS W95 in our faculty,
which go down pretty regularly.  It's a pain for students and a
pain for academic staff (we don't have any IT support staff to
speak of).  So I've cooked up a plan to make it easy to boot
these machines across the network as Linux-based X-terminals,
offering mail and Web services for starters.

In pure theory, this fits our needs perfectly.  Our faculty is
located some distance away from the central computing center, but
undergrads all have their accounts over there.  Nagoya is strong
in engineering, so the center uses Unix and X to provide mail
services.  If we run X-terms instead of MS apps, we can configure
them to broadcast an indirect Xdmcp query, answered from our own
server with a Chooser menu, from whence the students could select
the computer center mail server, login their display as they
normally would to that machine, and proceed as if they were in
the Center itself --- which saves them the hassle of schlepping
across campus, saves me the hassle of managing a separate mail
system for them, and saves all of us the time required to explain
to students how to manage their mail using floppy disks and Pop3.
Apart from which, the machine configuration will become more or
less bombproof --- the MS systems go down regularly, and whether
or not it's because students are less careful than they might be,
it's a right pain for everyone when a proportion of the machines
is down at any given time.

Net booting will also allow us to reinstall MS systems using dd
to the local hard disk, since the Linux installation will only
occupy memory and the CPU locally; "Reinstall broken MS W95" can
be put right underneath "Boot Linux Xterm from network" on a boot
menu, so that students can repair the local system themselves
(incidentally scrubbing all game software from the system, which
saves me additional work :).

The problem is that we can't get the CentreCom (Allied Telesis)
LA-PCI-T card that is installed throughout the faculty to work
reliably under Linux, and we can't get it to work at all after
booting a system via Netboot.  The driver module (tulip.o,
version 0.89F) loads okay and configures okay, but then nothing
comes off the card; processes just stare dumbly at the interface
until they are killed with ^C.

I'm now on the Tulip list, but since this is a Japan-market card,
I thought I would drop a line to the group and see if anyone has
found a way to get it to work reliably with Linux.

Has anyone run up against this one?

Cheers,
-- 
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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